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Amnesia

by Thomas M. Disch

Surreal, crime, slice of life
1986

Game Details

Off-Site Reviews

Hazlitt
The Only Thing Worse Than Bad Memories
[...] I found the experience captivating—both as a game, and in the way Disch’s unique literary sensibility made itself felt throughout. Amnesia blends a Hitchcockian wrong-man scenario with the setting of a paranoid thriller from the mid-’70s, spiking it all with a somewhat satirical take on New York City in the mid-1980s.
-- Tobias Carroll
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PC Gamer
As frustrating as its simulation elements are, it’s a relatively well written example of its craft and at least keeps the craziness coming thick and fast. Its main problem beyond the instant deaths is that the mystery it sets up isn’t really one that can play out properly on the streets of New York, not just because the actual conspiracy happens in Texas, but because only about four people in the city even play a minor part in it. That means lots of empty streets and unused locations, with puzzles little more than doing Stuff until the villains finally decide “Balls to this, we’ll just tell you what’s going on and try to shoot you.” If they’d just done that from the start, using their specialist skills like ‘knowing exactly where you are at all times’, they’d have been much, much more successful. [...]

A lost interactive fiction classic though? Ha. No. Forget it. In more ways than one.
-- Richard Cobbett
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SPAG
"Amnesia's" parser is perhaps the only one to equal Infocom's at the time. In many places it surpasses Infocom. With a vocabulary of about 1700 words and a multiple-sentence parser with plenty of synonyms, you'll very rarely need to hunt for a word. The one minor annoyance stems from the fact that objects' words aren't recognized if you try to use them when an object isn't in the current location -- for instance, you can't refer to a telephone of one isn't around, even though there may be one elsewhere in the game. But this is minor. Character interactions are detailed, and range from face-to-face meetings to conversations over the telephone.

The game itself is huge, with as many as 4000 locations. Most of them are street corners or parts of the Manhattan subway system (both of these are completely programmed into the game), although there are a number of buildings and New York landmarks for the player to visit. A map (among other things) is included in the game package, so there's no need to draw your own, but you'll probably need to at least jot down some notes.
-- Christopher E. Forman
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